In a recent review meeting on a problem with a high volume application many of the same questions that have been asked in the past were brought up. How does one prevent one problem from cascading into separate, unrelated facets of the application. On my old blog I spoke about circuit breakers in the specific case of a loop gone haywire. There are other kinds of circuit breakers that can be placed in applications that I have seen and proven work well.

One of the ones I tend to like and haven't really blogged about much allow the operations folks to disable specific functions of an application. This is easily facilitated if the application is well designed (i.e. functions are easily identifiable by examining the HTTP request itself) or is compartmentalized (i.e. separate functions are handled by separate logical clusters) where one cluster of servers only handles the "search" functions because we know that search will tend to exhaust resources vs the "checkout" function which we want to run 100% of the time so that every user that wants to can purchase the goods in their shopping cart. The beauty of this set up is that if any specific function, as detected through the application monitoring infrastructure, is experiencing a failure or is causing an unexpected bottleneck can quickly trip the circuit breaker and shunt any following requests to a "Sorry, not available" page.

The ability of this type of circuit breaker is key for a couple of reasons. First and foremost it addresses the fact that a failure of some sort is in progress and even though it hasn't been fixed we can quickly move traffic to another path that at least gives the end user a response. This avoid additional requests from overwhelming the production environment and having to restart all the servers to clear things up. The other reason is that it also allows for more sharing of the infrastructure because we have a plan to follow in the our runbook where we can quickly alleviate the problem by simply turning off the spigot.

I have seen two different approaches to solving this problem. In the case of the infrastructure if the functions of the application are easily identifiable or clustered independently then the operations team can easily modify either load balancing rules or make changes to the HTTP plugin configuration. I particularly like this one because as soon as the operations team has identified a particular fault they can trip the appropriate circuit breaker and get started with the problem determination steps.

Another approach, which can be used in combination with the previous solution, is to actually build into the application circuit breaker checks at various points in the code. This would then cause a read from the database to check on a bit in the environment to see if it should continue processing the current function or not. Similar to the loop circuit breaker I referenced above where if we know our loops should never iterate more than 500 times to have them abort and throw an exception on the 501st iteration. If there is a consensus among the operations and development teams that some piece of functionality has broken and bit can be flipped in the database and that function is either disabled and directs to an error page or can alternatively provide back some cached value (if possible, it depends on the kind of data the user was going after).